


talk slow on a school night

by Raria



Category: Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Growing Up Together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:08:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24246280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raria/pseuds/Raria
Summary: The first time Jessica meets Kilgrave, it’s perfectly on accident. She is nine and he is ten and he has just witnessed her jump off his roof into his backyard.Jessica watches his eyes go all delighted and fascinated and the first words out of her mouth are “Tell anyone about this and I’ll cut you in half with my laser eyes.”
Relationships: Jessica Jones/Zebediah Killgrave
Comments: 12
Kudos: 68





	talk slow on a school night

1.

The first time Jessica meets Kilgrave, it’s perfectly on accident. She is nine and he is ten and he has just witnessed her jump off his roof into his backyard.

Jessica watches his eyes go all delighted and fascinated and the first words out of her mouth are “Tell anyone about this and I’ll cut you in half with my laser eyes.”

He raises an eyebrow at her. “You don’t have laser eyes,” he says, cleanly amused. “If you did you wouldn’t be telling me about them.” There’s something dancing under his expression though, a vivid curiosity cut with a little awe, and Jessica is sharply aware of how closely he’s watching her.

And then his voice catches up to her ears. Jessica has mostly only heard accents like his on tv, and definitely not from precocious ten year old’s. She wonders if people really talk like that or if he’s imitating someone. It doesn’t fit him quite right, the posh-ness of it.

“Kilgrave,” he says, sticking out his hand abruptly, posture-perfect. Jessica scoffs at him.

“No you’re not,” she says. “That’s not a name. People have normal names. Like Jessica. Who are you trying to impress?”

There’s a flash of anger across his face, so quick she doubts her impression immediately. “It’s my name, _Jessica_ , I can make it whatever I want.” She sees the conscious decision, the moment he lets a little insecurity bleed into his voice. “Please call me Kilgrave.”

She files the knowledge away: he knows how to manipulate people. But it works on her a little anyway, and she sighs and shrugs. “Fine. _Kilgrave_. God. What do you want.”

He looks her up and down. “You’re in my yard, and you just jumped off the roof, and you’re acting like this is entirely normal. I want to know _everything._ ”

Jessica rolls her eyes and turns to walk out the gate, then realizes: he’s already seen her, what harm can it do. She takes a breath, then jumps neatly back up onto his roof and sprints quick away, hearing nothing behind her but the silence of Kilgrave’s plain astonishment.

2.

For the first three weeks, he follows her everywhere. The fourth time Jessica nearly has a heart attack from his slim shadow peeking out of an alleyway, she stands up, takes two quick strides over to him, and slams him against the peeling paint of the closest garage.

“Stop _following me_ ,” she hisses through her teeth. Distantly she registers the house’s motion detector flick on, and they’re lit up by blinding floodlights. She’s got a hand over his mouth, but his eyes are looking straight back at her, a little calculating and still full of that deep, vast curiosity.

When an adult starts shouting about calling the cops on them (on _kids, really,_ what is the point of being a minor if it doesn’t let you get away with shit) she gives Kilgrave up as a lost cause and drops him. She’s four steps down the alley when she hesitates, gives the murky sky above her a long-suffering glare, and spins on her heel. He’s still just _sitting_ there, _honestly,_ does he have any self-preservation instinct at all, but she pulls him roughly to his feet by his shirt collar.

“Come _on,_ ” she says, dragging him down the alley, and suddenly they’re both sprinting. She could outpace him in a second but there’s something about these looks he keeps giving her, like he’s _expecting_ her to, that keep her in step with him down the length of the block.

3.

After that they fall into a bit of a pattern. Kilgrave is pretentious and spoiled and nowhere near as clever as he thinks he is, he’s unhealthily obsessed with her powers and utterly rude to people he’s not interested in (basically: everyone else), but he’s never spoken a word about her to anyone and has never once looked at her afraid. He agrees to stop following her and she agrees to sit on his roof with him most nights and occasionally even talk about herself. All in all, he’s definitely got the better end of the bargain.

It’s a hot muggy evening in early September, one of those nights that feels like a misplaced July heatwave, when he starts lecturing her on the necessity of a _moral code_ for _superpowers._

“I mean, come on, Jessica,” he says, gesturing at her. He’s on his feet, pacing up and down the narrow strip of roof, and Jessica thinks, _if he falls he probably expects me to catch him, presumptuous bastard._ “You can’t just go around using your powers however you want, that’s just common sense. Who are you to decide whether your actions are right or wrong, if you know the law can’t hold you back? You’ve got this marvelous power—”

“And if you say a single word about great responsibility,” Jessica interrupts lazily, “I will push you off this roof, so help me.”

He spins and glares at her. “That’s my _point,_ Jessica. You _could_ push me off this roof. That’s exactly why you _can’t_.” His hands are still drifting around forceful, like he’s wondering if sign language will get through to her. “We need to set rules for you. Lines you won’t cross, laws you hold yourself to, that sort of thing.”

Jessica eyes Kilgrave. “What about the things I want to do, and I’m going to do anyways, and you can’t stop me?”

He shrugs. “Then I can’t stop you. But you’re better than that, I’m sure of it. You want to get it right.”

“Okay, but if someone were, I don’t know, falling off a roof—” she spares a second to give him a pointed look—“I’m not going to stop and check your rules, I’m going to fucking catch them.”

His eyes light up. “See, now you’re getting it!” he says, and she blinks, taken aback. “We’ll build in exceptions, obviously. Anytime you want to use your powers to save lives, be my guest. Isn’t that what they’re for?”

Jessica doesn’t answer, still a little bit stuck on his phrasing, the words “save lives” slipping gentle under her defenses. She wonders if Kilgrave really sees her as a person or if he just sees potential when he looks at her, the things her gifts could do.

The next evening he hands her four pages of handwritten notes in his (pretentiously) slanted, half-cursive script and looks expectantly at her. Jessica looks down at the papers, back at Kilgrave’s face, and says, “Oh come _on._ ” The first line on the page is a vow that she will only use her powers _for good_.

She vetoes a third of his ideas at once (“I am not going to write to my goddamn _representatives_ and ask them what kind of laws they would _hypothetically_ make about _hypothetical_ super strength, Kilgrave, what the fuck”). Others are so obvious and common sense that it almost unnerves her, that he thought it was necessary to write them down. At the end there’s a whole section on how to use her powers as a proper crime-fighting superhero, which is. Well.

“Kilgrave, you know I’m not going to do any of this, right?”

“Do what,” he says absently, scribbling a revision on one of the pages she’d crossed out vigorously in bold purple marker.

“The hero thing,” Jessica says, a little uncomfortable. Even the words sound ridiculous.

He looks up, and there’s something quietly disappointed behind his eyes. Like she’s letting him down. But then he gives her a quick smirk and she can almost believe she imagined it. “Just in case,” he says, casual. “Figured you might get bored and try to save the world.” She lets it go, and pretends not to notice him folding up the page and tucking it in his jacket pocket.

There’s also the part where he suggests that anytime she’s unsure, she should come to him for advice, and she can’t quite decide whether to be amused or offended or just fondly exasperated that he wants to set himself up as her moral touchstone.

“It’s not that!” he protests, when she asks him mockingly if her _conscience_ thought it was okay for them to go get ice cream yet. “It’s more like, a double-check. A safeguard. You’d do it for me, because I trust you. So let me help you.”

He’s always been good with words, and it’s always sort of worked on Jessica even when she sees straight through the spin. So she rolls her eyes and doesn’t say anything to stop the slow grin spreading across his face, and she leaves those lines as written.

4.

It’s four months into their bizarre rooftop friendship when he tells her he’s dying.

“There’s a special kind of hell you live when your parents are your doctors,” he says, an odd twist in his voice she can’t place. Jessica is used to Kilgrave’s melodrama by now but this time it feels habitual, rote. Like he’s somehow dramatizing his vulnerability into a shield.

Jessica elbows him softly, just barely catches his flinch out of the corner of her eye. “At least you know they won’t give up on you,” she says, keeping her voice deliberately light.

Kilgrave gives a sharp little laugh, looking away from her and out across the rooftops. It’s nearly dawn, and neither of them has slept, exhaustion shaping the world all faded and muffled. For a few minutes they sit in silence. Jessica is watching the wasps’ nest on the telephone pole across the street, thinking only of tossing stones at it, tearing it down, smoking it to death. She’s not thinking of the shape beside her wrapped in a thin fleece blanket, marching steadily towards his grave.

“Sometimes I wish they would,” he says finally, and she can hear the fatigue in his voice, weariness that has nothing to do with their all-nighter and doesn’t fit him any better than his too-posh accent. “The things they do to me, the things they keep trying, they _hurt_.”

Jessica knows that Kilgrave knows life-saving medical trials aren’t necessarily uncomplicated, or even painless, but she cuts him a little slack. It’s hard to rationalize it away when it’s your _parents_. She doesn’t really have the words for it, though, so she reaches over and grips his shoulder instead, her best shot at quiet reassurance.

“It’s why I’m here, so there’s that,” he says after a moment, scuffing his shoe against the roof. She looks at him, not following the thread. “Why we moved,” he explains. “There was this clinical study they wanted to get me into. Back home. But I was a couple years too young for it. Didn’t qualify. So when they heard about another group doing the same trial across the ocean we packed our bags.”

Jessica spends a moment wondering whether it will make her an irredeemable selfish asshole if she’s at all glad, but Kilgrave clearly sees it as a silver lining, so she lets the fact sit bittersweet and undisturbed between them.

“Maybe it will work,” she says, inadequate, too-forced. The optimist role doesn’t fit her all that well.

Kilgrave smirks, no humor behind it. “Maybe.”

5.

As insufferable as Kilgrave can be to everyone else, Jessica has always proudly claimed the role of the bossy one in their weird friendship, so for a strangely long while they don’t even notice. Maybe she passes him a soccer ball a little more thoughtlessly than she would have, maybe she hands him half her Snickers bar when she’d actually been quite hungry, thanks. But all in all things are passing normal until the day he comes to her utterly delighted, lit up with incandescent joy.

“Jessica,” he breathes, eyes shining, “guess what.”

He tells her the story like he’s narrating an action movie. How Aaron Mack had shoved Lee Martinez into the trophy case at school, and how he, Kilgrave, had stepped forward. How he hadn’t known what to say, other than stupid, brave, insignificant words, _back off_ and _leave him alone_ and _get out of here_. How Aaron had blinked once and walked straight out of the school.

He leaves spaces in the story for her reactions, pauses for laughter and gasps and applause, but getting none of them doesn’t seem to phase him. He’s earnestly, dazzlingly proud.

Jessica listens mutely, a slow rolling dismay in her stomach, and she doesn’t even know why. They’re sitting on the steps of the school because he’d insisted it couldn’t wait till that evening and she feels a surge of irrational anger at him, for the simple act of springing this on her outside of their familiar ground. The world feels off-kilter, bleached pale in the bright sunlight.

Kilgrave starts telling her how he began to test it, figure out what he could make his classmates do, still so blindingly joyful, and something snaps in Jessica’s chest. She’s gripping his shoulder tight before she can think, and he stumbles over his words.

“How could you” she whispers, and it’s entirely the wrong thing to say. He looks baffled, for a moment, and then a slow dawning betrayal starts to creep over his face.

“I thought you’d be happy for me. I thought you of all people would understand,” he says, a little vicious.

Jessica tries to find the right words, or any words, really, but they won’t come. She wonders distantly if it’s possible to be in shock from conversation alone.

He’s looking at her like he doesn’t know her. “So it’s all fine and good for you, but as soon as someone else gets powers, you’re jealous, is that it?” His voice is rising, and they don’t do this, talk about her _powers_ directly anywhere but their roof, and she gestures urgently for him to be quiet. Too late, she sees his eyes widen and know he’ll take it as a confirmation.

“It’s not that,” she says, agonized. “I don’t want your, your powers, and it’s not that I don’t want you to have your own, but—” she stops. “I mean, there’s something wrong with what you did, isn’t there?”

He looks outraged. “I stopped a bully!” he shouts.

“By becoming one,” Jessica whispers. She’s still hanging on to his shoulder like she can keep him grounded, and Kilgrave notices when he goes to stand up and she comes with him.

“Let go of me,” he snaps. She does, instantly. He looks plainly horrified. “I didn’t—I mean—”

“Don’t you dare,” she says, trembling. “Don’t you _dare_ use it on me, don’t you—”

“I’m sorry,” he interrupts, breathing hard, something suddenly unfolding in his expression. She has never seen him look so unraveled. “I promise, I promise, I won’t, not on you, I swear.”

“Not on _anyone_ ,” she hisses, distantly furious, trying frantically not to be terrified. “Not for anything that matters.” She still can’t reach out to pin him down again, her arms will not obey her. Jessica balls her hands into fists at her side.

“Promise me,” she says, “promise you won’t use it on people for no reason. That you won’t go around making people do things.”

He nods at once, still looking decisively shaken. Jessica has this twist in her gut that says she’s missing something. But she’s got his promise, and she knows him, knows he won’t want to let her down. It’s a start.

6.

The first time he does it on accident, they’re both cross-legged on his roof, watching the bats darting between distant trees. It’s a dim twilight, sunset was two hours ago and wasn’t anything approaching spectacular. He looks over at her and smirks, and she eyes him warily. “What."

“Just—hold still a second.” She feels her muscles lock in place, gentle, and knows right away he didn’t mean it. He’s just recklessly forgotten himself.

Kilgrave reaches up carefully and brushes a spider from her cheek. It really does only take a second. And then her body unfreezes and she shoves him roughly away.

“You can’t _do_ that,” she says, and she’s appalled to hear her voice crack. Kilgrave looks blankly at her for a moment, clearly replaying the last few seconds to try to identify his misstep. Then his eyes go wide.

“I didn’t mean literally,” he says, apologetic. “I didn’t mean it as a command, it was just an expression.”

“But that’s the problem, Kilgrave,” Jessica says, suddenly cold, her brief fleeting terror slipping into her voice. She’s realizing the ramifications, the depth of what she’s about to ask of him, as the words leave her mouth. “You don’t get that luxury anymore. You don’t get to be careless about words, _ever_. You can’t yell at someone to go away, or to fuck off. You don’t get to be sarcastically bossy. You can’t sing along to _song lyrics_ if you haven’t thought through every one.”

He’s looking at her in incredulity, and not a little anger. “You make it sound like this is curse and not a gift,” he says, defiant. “Think of what I could do with it!”

And she does, of course, because he asked her to. She sees unbidden all the astounding possibilities, soldiers laying down weapons at a word, hate crimes melting away, billionaires donating to end world hunger. She sees an end to crime in their city, women on three am runs without a shred of fear. She sees vicious punishments for the criminals he couldn’t prevent. She sees Kilgrave, untouchable. She sees a line of people standing motionless on a cliff edge. She sees him grinning at her, asking her to smile.

And then he’s saying, “Wait, no, think about whatever you want,” and she can see the moment he gets it. She meets his eyes unflinching and gives him a commiserating smile, entirely her own.

“We need to set rules for you,” she says, and he laughs, just a little mocking, and also a little sad. He remembers too.

They spend the next two nights handwriting pages of rules for him, the same sort of thing he’d done unasked for her, but it’s immediately clear that his are going to have to be infinitely more complicated. For one thing, he’s got no idea how the specifics work, the edge cases, and Jessica flatly refuses to let him go around testing school bullies to figure them out.

“I’ve got to find out at some point, Jessica,” he says, waving his hands dismissively. “If I order something general—say, tell the truth, something like that—how long does it last? Forever? For the next statement? Does my intent behind the command matter? Does their understanding? Think like a _scientist_ , Jessica—if, if you want to,” he adds on quickly, just catching himself.

“We’ll just have to make our best guesses,” she snaps. “We’re not experimenting with people’s free will. And you are _not_ testing it on me.”

Instead, they write rules based on worst-case scenarios, rules he should try for even though they’re too confining to be feasible. When she tells him flat out that he can never order anyone to do something just to make his life easier he looks at her with mutiny in his eyes and she thinks, unfairly, _I bet if he’d gotten his powers first he never would have trapped himself into morals_. But he nods.

7.

Jessica is eleven and Kilgrave is twelve and they’re lying on the patch of grass between the Garters’ dumpster and the fire hydrant. It’s the first day of June and if there were any justice in the world there would be no such thing as math homework in June. Jessica snaps her pencil in half and elbows Kilgrave in the stomach.

“Why can’t you do anything _useful_ with your dumb voice and order homework to do itself,” she says, generally irritated, wanting someone to needle. Kilgrave turns on his side to look at her and she can tell he’s laughing at her in his head.

“I could order you to do it,” he says, sly, and she knows him well enough to know when he’s teasing so she just kicks him in the knee.

“Nah,” she says. “I’ve gotta do it anyways, you’d just be Mrs. Diane but more annoying.”

He blinks at her slow, and something indefinable shifts, and he says quiet, “…I could order you to _like_ it.” And Jessica sits up so fast she gets a head rush because that, that was not a joke. That one he’d meant.

For a long breath she doesn’t say anything, trying to gather her words, and after a moment he rolls his shoulders and sits up too. He looks at her steadily, passively, but taking nothing back.

“You can’t—” she stops, clears her throat. “You promised me you wouldn’t.”

“I’m not commanding you, Jessica,” he says calmly. “I’m offering. Your choice.”

Jessica can’t quite catch her breath fully. It feels like she’s being compressed. There’s something infinitely tempting about it, the knowledge that she could script out words and have them become true through his voice. That she could surrender her motivation, trust her actions in his hands. She wonders if it’s possible to be an addict before you start.

“No,” she manages. “I—no. I don’t want that. Not right now. Not for this.”

He raises an eyebrow at her, skeptical, and she has a flash of hatred for his arrogance, his utter confidence that lets him see right through her, down to her wanting core. But he doesn’t push it, doesn’t say anything else, just pulls out a spare pencil from the pocket of his overpriced jacket and hands it over.

8.

It’s a bitterly cold night in the first week of February, Jessica is twelve and Kilgrave is thirteen. They’re on the roof anyways out of sheer stubborn pride. Jessica is leaning over the edge, breaking off icicles to throw at Kilgrave just to annoy him into going inside first.

“We could do it, you know,” he says, an utter non-sequitur. Jessica kicks snow at him. He knows better than to be all dramatic and cryptic at her.

He steals one of her icicles. “You could try giving me a second to explain, Jessica. What I mean is that we could do it, together. The hero thing.”

Jessica sits back on her heels and looks at him for a moment. He’s always had this irrational optimism, this idealism that pushes at the narrow border with arrogance, with conceit. The settled certainty that if he decides he wants something, he can make it his. She wishes she could blame it on something as simple as his power but it’s almost the other way around.

It doesn’t help that he looks the part, right now. All edges and shadows muted by the quiet snow, glowing with reflected yellow streetlight, he looks like something ethereal. He looks like he could take over the world.

Jessica’s never been one to dwell on poetic moments, though, so she looks back down and starts stabbing her icicles into the snow in a half circle around her, making a miniature wall. She doesn’t answer Kilgrave.

He sighs. “What do you have against helping people?” he asks, shamelessly manipulative as ever. He’s turning the last icicle over and over in his hands. Jessica briefly wishes for him to get frostbite and stop asking her to be something she can’t be.

“It’s not the helping people part,” Jessica says, accidentally snapping one of her tiny defenses in half. “It’s more, there are enough chances to fuck things up in our own lives, why put other people’s lives on top of that.”

There’s a brief silence. “You know I thought about it, right?” Jessica asks suddenly. “Before—” she gestures up and down at Kilgrave, trying to encapsulate how for better or worse her feelings on powers had taken a sharp-angled turn the day Kilgrave had told a bully to walk away. “Before I realized how easy it would be to get it wrong.”

He gives her a look that’s trying for mocking but turns out a little hurt. “You think— are you saying you think I get it wrong?”

“No,” she says, only the tiniest bit too fast. “I’m saying watching you, it’s easy to see how someone _could_ get it wrong.”

Something tired and yet again too old for him flickers across his face. “I could only do it with you, I think,” he says, but resigned now, like they’re talking impossible hypotheticals, what they’d do if they won the lottery. “I think you’re right, I think I would get it wrong if I go it alone.” He smiles at her, more sincere than he ever gets. “You’re my conscience, Jessica Jones.”

She knows he’s right, and it’s an unsettling blend of pride and unease, knowing that without her there’s a real chance he would have spiraled off into something unimaginable. She tries for a smile in return. “Best we avoid heroism then, I’m a garbage role model.”

He doesn’t have an answer for a long moment. When she notices his teeth are chattering she shoots him a quick victorious grin and sticks out her tongue. He opens his mouth to protest and she scoops up all her melting icicles at once and dumps them down the back of his collar, and it’s as good a way of derailing the conversation as any.

9.

Two minutes after fourth period history on the second-to-last day of freshman year, Jessica spots Kilgrave in the hallway and promptly drags him into the nearest classroom.

“I need your help,” she hisses, and he raises an eyebrow at her. Normally they don’t even talk to each other at school. Somehow, rooftop conversations about their respective superpowers don’t really transfer over all that well.

“Your wish is my command, Jessica,” he says, just to be a dick about it. She pinches his shoulder, hard.

“I talked myself into something,” she says in a rush, “and it’s going to be terrible, but that asshole needs to be taught a lesson, and there’s no goddamn way I’m backing down, so I need you.”

He waits a second. “You do know you haven’t actually told me what you need yet, right?”

“Shut up,” Jessica says, pushing him into the whiteboard. “It’s fucking Conrad, he was doing this dumbass macho posturing thing, and I said that any fucking alpha male thing he could do, I could do in half the time.”

Kilgrave gives her a look that somehow seems to insult the intelligence of her entire family. “So you can go out and beat him in race, Jessica, it’s not like you’re hiding.”

She sighs and glares at the ceiling, then back at Kilgrave. “He pulled out these ghost peppers,” she says, and Kilgrave blinks, then laughs aloud.

“You _hate_ spicy food,” he says, infuriatingly delighted. Jessica glowers. He’s right, she hates spicy food more than nearly anything in the world besides condescending macho posturing and useless best friends who laugh in her face. “But I’m rather sure telling him to back out would be breaking my rules.”

“That’s not what I’m asking,” she says. “I need—I want you to help me follow through. I want to not hate it, for a minute.”

He sobers at once, and gives her a weighted, measuring look. They both know the magnitude of this, the request and the implicit permission it suggests, and it’s not remotely about ghost peppers.

“Are you sure?” he asks, and Jessica loves him for it, just a bit.

“What’s the point of useless powers like yours, otherwise,” she says instead. He smirks at her, fond and intrigued and a little astonished. She shoves a crumpled piece of paper at him.

Kilgrave reads it over and his eyebrows rise. “You’ve written me a script,” he notes.

“Yeah, well,” says Jessica. “I don’t trust you _that_ much.”

He laughs like she hasn’t just set her free will blindly in his hands and opens his mouth to read her words.

10.

They’re both fifteen, in that brief two-week span where their ages overlap, and they’re in the middle of the worst fight of their friendship.

It started ugly (“maybe your _powers_ are just a product of you thinking you’re better than literally everyone else”) and got uglier (“I’m surprised the _real_ heroes haven’t gutted you yet for how useless you’ve actually been to the world”). It’s a no-holds-barred kind of fight, she’s already made a jab at his parents’ abuse and he’s already accused her of ruining Trish’s life, and honestly, they should have seen it coming, but Jessica has a flash of simple black and white hatred for the boy in front of her and punches him clean in the face.

She manages to hold back enough not to jam his nose into his brain but it’s a near thing. As it is, she hears the sharp snap of bone, feels the dull force of the transferred whiplash, and knows she’s stepped clear over the line. Kilgrave looks shocked, then mutely livid, then utterly betrayed. Each emotion travels across his face at a fraction of its usual pace and Jessica knows he’s concussed, at the very least.

And they should have seen this coming too but Jessica watches it unfold in jerks and starts, sees his eyes go narrow and then carefully blank. “Stop moving,” he says, quiet, infinitely controlled. She feels her fists freeze in place, her nails digging into her palms. He’s looking at her hands.

There’s a long moment of silence. And then Kilgrave says like a gunshot, “Punch yourself. In the chest. Hard as you can.”

It’s the angle that saves her, she can’t get good leverage. Even so she feels at least two ribs snap. She nearly cries out, but her jaw is still fixed shut, the only thing given permission to move her rebellious fist. Kilgrave still isn’t looking at her face.

He steps toward her, and she can feel his eyes raking up her body, but there’s no desire in his gaze, barely a shred of that permanent curiosity. Jessica isn’t sure if it’s the concussion or the rage but he seems somehow like an alternate version of the Kilgrave she knows, a version who never had a borrowed conscience, who never paced around rooftops talking about moral codes. There’s blood on his cheekbones.

“You know, Jessica,” he says, conversational, “the only reason you don’t stand frozen like this in front of me _every day_ is because I _let_ you walk free. And if I decide, right now—” His eyes finally rise to meet hers, and Jessica has no idea what kind of expression is on her face, because it was frozen there minutes ago. She knows she is not crying. Kilgrave’s eyes are muddy, vague, but still sharply focused. He looks like he’s sleepwalking.

There’s a beat. A dangerous, knife-edge breath. And then something flips in his expression and Kilgrave suddenly looks like he’s been hit over the head. Or at least, punched in the face. He sucks in a sudden gasp of air and says in a rush, “I’m sorry I’m sorry you can move ignore every command I’ve given you I’m so sorry Jessica forgive me.”

She loosens her fists. Lets out the small cry of pain that’s been sitting trapped behind her teeth. And turns her back on him and walks straight away.

11.

Jessica doesn’t talk to him for a solid two months. For a while she’s sure she’ll never talk to him again. He texts her obsessively, every day’s apology more elaborate and achingly sincere. He emails her a pretentious, half-awful but entirely earnest manifesto detailing exactly how he plans to use his powers. He sends her an actual letter through the actual postal service despite them living two houses apart.

In the end, the thing that brings her back is the memory seared vivid-bright in her dreams, the moment right after he let her go. It’s the only time in their friendship she’s ever seen him look afraid.

She sits on the roof above his room and kicks the cracked shingles a couple times. Something shatters below her and he’s there within thirty seconds. Jessica buries her hands in the pocket of her hoodie and doesn’t look at Kilgrave.

“I’m sorry,” he says, practiced, reflexive, then seems to get stuck. “I—”

Jessica lets him struggle for eighteen seconds. She counts. “I know,” she says finally. “I’m not forgiving you.”

There’s a sharp breath behind her. “But you might let me prove it. You’ll consider giving me another chance. You’re talking to me.” It’s a bizarre blend of hope and his constant, arrogant certainty, but she hears the qualifiers, the “might” and “consider” shaping the phrases a little awkward yet undeniably open ended.

Jessica leans back on her hands and tips her head back to see him, framed upside-down against the stars. “Kilgrave,” she says, tired, “we need to talk about consent.”

He frowns. “I know about consent,” he says, defensive but still cautious, on eggshells. “Is that what this is about? Because I—”

“No, listen to me,” she says. “I read your goddamn manifesto and you don’t. You think it’s the same for you as it is for everyone else, and it’s not.”

Kilgrave looks bewildered. “Why would it be any different for me? More important, sure, I get that. But isn’t it the same fundamental thing?”

“Let me ask you this,” she says. “If you tell someone about your power, and then ask her if she’s okay with you giving her a command. And she says yes, but you can tell she doesn’t really believe you. Doesn’t think it will actually work. Is that consent?”

Kilgrave opens his mouth, then hesitates. He’s smart enough to know the answer she’s looking for, and to know it doesn’t match the one he wants to give. She sees confusion flit across his face and knows suddenly with a horrible certainty that it’s genuine. He really hadn’t known.

“How am I supposed to prove it, then,” he says instead.

“You don’t,” Jessica says. “You live with the knowledge that she doesn’t believe you and never take the chance to prove her wrong. Or you come to me, and ask me if I’m in a good enough mood to be a prop for your fucking need to be right all the time. Pick your poison.”

Kilgrave runs a hand through his hair, a habit he didn’t have last time they spoke. “Alright, fine,” he says finally. “I need your help. I need to rewrite my rules.”

She nods, and then says, because she’s been thinking about it, “You need to test it on me this time. We need to know the exact limits.”

He looks surprised, but after a moment gives her a small, apologetic smile. “Not the timing I would have picked. But you’re right.”

It’s the worst night of her life. He makes her script every command, asks if she’s sure at least three times before each one. She gets utterly sick of the sensation of her hands moving without thought.

They discover commands in Spanish, which they both know passing well, work just the same, but commands in Latin, which Kilgrave alone learned in middle school like the pretentious rich white boy he is, have absolutely no effect. They discover if he gives a command with two possible interpretations Jessica can take her pick, but if she doesn’t see one of the options until he points it out, she’ll do the other automatically. They discover impossible commands can’t be followed literally, but if there’s any figurative interpretation, she’ll still be compelled to do that. It takes her a week to shake the feeling “turn invisible” invoked, the oppressive need to make herself smaller, to hide, to vanish into a crowd and never resurface.

By dawn they have a new draft. They both skip school, standard for Jessica and strikingly rare for Kilgrave, and finish his rules around eleven. He sits back, proud, and she curls up on the sun-warmed roof, numb.

12.

She doesn’t forgive him and doesn’t forgive him. Even once they’ve adjusted to every one of his updated rules she can’t do it, can’t trust him properly. Sometimes when he opens his mouth she flinches. After the sixth month of trying to convince herself to take his word on faith she gives up and spends a week following him around.

She watches a stranger shove roughly past Kilgrave on the street, and he stumbles, swings around to face the man, and makes a sharp gesture he definitely picked up from Jessica, but he doesn’t open his mouth. She watches a girl he was flirting with laugh in his face, and his eyes go cold and dangerous, but he turns around and walks away from her without a word. In a bitter fit of morbid curiosity she bribes a classmate of his to hit him, the exact same way she did, and he straightens back up and grins reckless at the boy with blood on his teeth, then turns and sprints away. She watches him pause in front of a screaming match on his neighbors’ front lawn, sees his mouth open, then close, before he walks away without looking back. There’s nothing on his face but boundless frustration.

She sees him use his power exactly once, yelling _wait_ at a toddler wandering unnoticed towards a street, it’s all very disgustingly sweet and wholesome and heroic. She tries not to keep thinking about how even that single word was chosen specific, it wasn’t “freeze” or “stop” or “don’t move”; it was only a command to hesitate. It’s when he doesn’t mention it to her, brag about it or use it as ammunition in his perpetual attempts to convince her towards the hero thing, that she decides to forgive him.

13.

Jessica is sixteen and Kilgrave is seventeen and she’s been spending her nights at Jamie Callager’s house and spending her days complaining to Kilgrave about how bad Jamie is in bed.

“I truly don’t understand what you see in him,” Kilgrave says, after her most recent rant on Jamie’s inability to read body language.

Jessica snorts. “He’s hot as fuck and absurdly sweet to his neighbors and doesn’t mind that I can lift more than him. What else could I want.” It comes out a little flat, but Kilgrave doesn’t call her out on it.

“Anything I can do to help?” he asks instead, an odd note in his voice. Jessica glances at him, but he looks normal. A little teasing, maybe, but that’s entirely on brand.

She sighs. “As much as I’m tempted to ask you for a command to enjoy sucking dick, that’s probably a little too weird, even for us.” Kilgrave chokes and looks over at her in astonishment, and she smirks at him, then punches him in the arm. “Thanks, though.”

He rolls with the punch and it strikes her suddenly, out of nowhere and with absolute certainty, that in the entirety of their friendship Kilgrave hasn’t touched her unasked. Sure, she’s physical with him all the time, the way you are with best friends: pokes, shoves, gripped shoulders, punches never meant except the once. But she has a brief flash of memory, her barbed-wire nine-year-old voice confessing on a rooftop that she hates being touched by strangers, and realizes that Kilgrave has never once broken that boundary. She wonders if he still sees himself as a stranger, then dismisses the thought. He’s too self-assured for that.

“How’s your love life, then,” she asks him, and he gives a halfhearted shrug.

“Not really trying, to be honest,” he says, and it’s her turn to look skeptical. Kilgrave has always been a flirt, since he discovered that all his practice with nuanced words had another practical application.

“What, got bored with all the girls you know?”

He smirks. “And the boys, if we’re being precise.” Jessica’s a little surprised, but more at how casual it is than anything else. She slots the knowledge neatly into her understanding of her best friend, right in between “things he cares about” and “things I definitely need to learn more about in order to make fun of his taste forever, oh my god”.

But in the moment she leans into his shoulder briefly, commiserating. “I’m sure you’ll find someone who likes overpriced Italian food as much as you someday,” she says. Jessica feels him laugh but doesn’t look up, doesn’t turn around in order to see the expression on his face.

14.

Kilgrave tells her he’s in love with her on his own nineteenth birthday, and Jessica’s emotions blur clean into indecipherable echoing static.

The thing is, he’s melodramatic. He tells anecdotes about his life like they’re storybook. Jessica has absolutely no doubt that if Kilgrave developed a passing crush on his best friend he’d hop the line straight to naming it love without a second thought.

She looks back at him and something twists in her stomach, something hopeful and bright and unsure. But it’s not love. She is eighteen years old and she thoroughly hates fairytales and this, this is just _potential_.

There’s a distinct naked vulnerability in his eyes, but Jessica knows his tricks by now. He could call up that vulnerability on command, for effect, real or not. Or even if he’s convinced himself it’s real. Kilgrave is hopeful, optimistic, looking forward to her answer, and Jessica knows all at once she can’t do this.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and watches the honest shock flicker across his face. He really had expected a neat happily ever after. “I can’t.” _You don’t mean it._

She waits for the surprise to pass and watches for the anger, the vicious, lashing edge; she knows how he handles rejection. But it doesn’t come. She can’t read a thing on his face besides resignation.

“You’re my best friend,” she says, like an excuse, like a consolation prize. He knows that already.

Kilgrave nods, mute, none of his perpetual well-chosen words softening the sharp razor edge suddenly there between them. Jessica reaches out, grips his shoulder. She loves him fiercely. He doesn’t shake off her hand, but there’s something like grief flayed raw behind his eyes, and when she lets him go he walks away.

She watches him leave and she thinks _maybe, maybe_ , but she holds her tongue.

15.

It’s a chilly morning in May and they’re talking on Jessica’s fire escape when they discover they have both independently saved the same unlucky girl in a two-week span.

Since high school ended they’ve had to shift their routine a little, neither of them willing to stay at home a moment longer than required even if it meant the necessary sacrifice of their familiar ground. And as much as Jessica is a deeply nocturnal person, she has to admit the realities of soul-sucking adult jobs make it far easier to have conversations in the muted pre-dawn light than after sunset most days. Kilgrave is always revoltingly chipper at six am, but he sometimes brings her coffee so she forgives him for it.

“So I told the prick to let her go at once, and to not come near her again,” Kilgrave says, glancing at Jessica, a habitual moment of seeking her approval for the command’s phrasing. “And when he did she turned to me and said ‘I am either the luckiest or unluckiest fucker in this city, how many of you are there anyways.’”

Jessica grins in spite of herself. Her own moment with the girl had been a lot less vigilante-style, she’d just noticed a head angled down towards a phone, a distracted taxi driver, and had snagged the girl’s coat sleeve before she could step into the street. Besides reflexes, it didn’t even use her powers.

“You know, maybe we’re already doing the hero thing,” Kilgrave says all of a sudden, astonishment under his voice.

Jessica scoffs. “Pretty sure I would have noticed if you put on a costume and started punching bad guys, Kilgrave.”

“No, not like that,” he says. “I hadn’t thought of it before, but we do help people. We do save lives. We just don’t seek it out, all the danger and, and alien invasions. But we don’t stand by and watch, either.”

“Speak for yourself,” Jessica says, leaning against the railing and looking out at the city lit yellow and gray with streetlights. The frost spiderwebbed across shop windows is starting to melt and it’s like a photograph fading into focus. She still loses her breath sometimes at how strikingly beautiful New York can be.

“If you want, tell me the last time you had a chance to stop something and you let it happen instead. Even if it would have been easier.” Kilgrave sounds sure of it, his faith in her a little unreal and definitely undeserved. But she thinks a moment, and gradually her reluctance to disappoint him tilts into an honest lack of anything to say. She can feel him grow smug beside her and elbows him.

“So you win,” she says, and it comes out sounding like gratitude.

16.

Jessica is twenty and Kilgrave is twenty-one and neither of them has mentioned it in two and a half years but sometimes Jessica looks at him and gets this wrenched overwhelming sense of loss. Like she’s missing out on something precious, something irreplaceable.

By now she knows he’d meant it. She isn’t considering PI work for nothing, and she’d watched his eyes, his words, his movements around her for months after that horribly awkward birthday. But just when she’d been on the verge of swallowing her pride, saying _okay, I buy it, let’s get dinner,_ he’d gone on a date with someone from the pretentious poetry seminar he adored and Jessica had bitten her tongue, tucked away her regrets. Maybe if she’d taken that seminar she’d be able to say something profound about missed chances.

It’s a soft night in the city and they’re walking to the second-best but also closest Chinese place they know, a route they’ve walked a hundred times, when three men step out into the alley ahead of them, very obviously holding guns.

Jessica and Kilgrave exchange a look. “Drop your weapons,” Kilgrave calls, almost bored. They don’t. They step forward, and Jessica notices with a sharp jolt that they’re wearing _earplugs_. Which means these aren’t muggers, they’re hunters who know exactly who they’re facing.

She shoots another look at Kilgrave. He’s seen it too. She steps forward, in front of him. If he doesn’t have his voice he’s no more than human. When the first man raises his gun to fire she dives for him.

Within the first second she’s been slammed in the head with something heavy so she remembers the rest in flashes. Throwing a figure into the alley wall. Slipping on a pool of blood. Pulling an earplug from a man’s ear, leaving him to Kilgrave’s mercy.

She has a flash of clarity, Kilgrave standing thirty feet away, motionless. To any observer watching a silent tape it would look like he didn’t care.

“Jessica, duck!”

She feels her muscles collapse, a heartbeat before her own instinct would have compelled her to obey anyways. A bullet passes whisper soft over her head. She trips the last man, kicks him in the face. Puts her hand on the ground to steady herself as the world darkens. Kilgrave is by her side in a breath and she wonders if she’s losing time.

“I’m so sorry,” he says, bitter, ashamed. “I shouldn’t have ordered you, I should have trusted you’d be fine, I couldn’t think.” It’s the first time in years he’s given her a command.

Jessica looks at him and there’s something immeasurable in his eyes, something rooted in that same deep fascination he never lost when looking back at her, and she says soft, “ _oh,”_ before the street flickers black.

There’s a blur of hospital beds, and Kilgrave claiming next-of-kin status, and some truly terrible vending machine food. But soon enough they’re back on her fire escape, looking out at the city, still alive.

Jessica turns to him, words ready in her mouth, but he’s already looking at her. There are fairytales playing out behind his eyes and she finds suddenly that she doesn’t mind.

“Can I?” he asks, quiet, sure, and Jessica shivers.

“ _Yes_ ,” she says, and he kisses her, and he doesn’t say another word.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Chappell Roan's "School Nights".
> 
> This is the first thing I've written in... about five years? so any and all feedback would be welcomed and appreciated. thanks for reading!


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